Ancient Mexico Facts

Like most developing countries, Mexico gradually adopted elements of consumer culture and retailing technology from the outside. Starting in the 1940s Mexico quickly adopted new commercial formats and techniques as they developed in the United States and Europe, but their penetration into mass consumer culture was limited by the size of the middleand upper-income population. In the period from 1946 to the early 1970s the Mexican economy grew vigorously and the ranks of the middle class grew. By some estimates the percentage of the population with middle-class incomes and occupations doubled between 1940 and 1970. Part of this trend was a shift away from a principally rural, agrarian economy to one characterized by industrial production and large urban centers (by 1960 more than half of the Mexican population lived in towns of 2,500 or more). For many Mexicans, acquiring the accoutrements of U.S. middle-class life became a status symbol and a mark of having achieved respectability. The necessary trappings for this respectability extended beyond clothes, televisions, and automobiles to include the type of store in which one shopped. In the postwar years U.S.-style advertising and marketing methods, often introduced by U.S. companies, encouraged them.

Department Stores to Shopping Malls

Mexican department stores directly copied the style of similar stores in New York and Paris. The Palacio de Hierro, built in 1891 in downtown Mexico City, was the first of its type in the country. Several imitators, such as the Puerto de Liverpool and Casa Boker, soon followed. With their multilevel flagship stores in the heart of the city center, elegant interiors, and glass display cases full of mostly imported merchandise, department stores became the symbolic center of the urban commercial scene. Grandest of all was the Sanborn’s Store in the Palacio de los Azulejos, a converted colonial mansion decorated with blue tiles. These stores introduced Mexican consumers to the practice of selling at a fixed price, rather than bargaining. It took several decades, however, for this practice to spread to the general population.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS